On January 17, 2024, Bobby J. Smith II discussed his new book Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement as part of the History Is Lunch series.
“Food has been used as a weapon to reinforce racial dominance since the beginning of slavery in America. In their memoirs, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs recalled how slave masters would withhold food to control enslaved people and starve them into submission,” said Smith. “By the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Black activists in the South and beyond created their own food mechanisms to shield themselves from the weaponization of food.”
Food Power Politics centers on four case studies in Mississippi, including the 1962-63 Greenwood Food Blockade and the food stamps campaign initiated by white grocers in its wake, and the efforts of the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative’s efforts to retain some control in the production, consumption, and distribution of locally produced food. A present-day case study examines how Black youth are building a food justice movement in the Delta to continue the food story of the Mississippi civil rights movement.
“The food story of the civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta provides a quintessential perspective on understanding food power politics in Black life,” Smith said.
Monica M White, author of Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, wrote that “Food Power Politics provides a perspective on history, on food justice, and on the fight for civil and human rights that offers important lessons for how we understand food sovereignty.”
Bobby J. Smith II is assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his BS in agriculture from Prairie View A&M University and his MS in agricultural economics and PHD in development sociology, both from Cornell University. Smith has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute in partnership with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. His Food Power Politics is the inaugural book of the newly launched Black Food Justice series at the University of North Carolina Press.
History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores all aspects of the state’s past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.
